How charismatic Christians became allies of political authoritarianism

Matthew Taylor exaggerates their influence, but his diagnosis is broadly relevant

Sean Feucht, a singer with connections to the New Apostolic Reformation movement, on a visit to US President Donald Trump.

Two great podcasters who speak to global Christianity more effectively than I do are Jeff Fountain, director of the Schuman Centre for European Studies, in Amsterdam and Brian Stiller, host of the World Evangelical Alliance’s “Evangelical 360” podcast, in Toronto.

Since last March, Fountain has been urging me to watch his interview with Matthew Taylor, whose book The Violent Take It by Force highlights the role of charismatic Christian supremacists in boosting Donald Trump and his authoritarian tendencies. This week, Stiller released an interview with Taylor. Yesterday, I listened to both interviews.

It’s too early to say that the Trump presidency is collapsing beneath the weight of its own extremism, cruelty, and unpopularity. But with Trump’s misuse of the justice system, his apparently extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean Sea, and his ultimately unsuccessful attempts to conceal information on sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein raising national and international alarm, and with his approval rating in US polls gradually slipping, maybe this is a good time to consider Taylor’s perspective.

Taylor highlights the independent charismatic New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement as a key contributor to Trump’s ascendancy and to the perception that he is God’s chosen vessel to save America. Taylor explains that NAR comes from an authoritarian stream of charismatic Christianity that tends to place great authority in its so-called apostles and prophets.

Taylor contends that this spiritually authoritarian impulse in the NAR became transferred to politics through the “seven mountains mandate,” a theory that Christians are called to take over seven spheres of society (business, government, family, religion, media, education, and entertainment). He says that when Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his Pentecostal vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, lost the 2008 election, the NAR went into resistance mode. Meanwhile, the decline in Christian affiliation among Americans and the 2015 US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage created an intensified sense that Christians needed to act to save their country.

Taylor carefully distinguishes between the NAR and other forms of Christian political advocacy, saying that the “religious right” movement associated with James Dobson, Pat Robertson,:and Jerry Falwell was “playing within the rules of democracy.” In contrast, he finds a hyper-aggressive form of spiritual warfare in NAR rhetoric.

“Many Christians believe in spiritual warfare,” Taylor said on Stiller’s podcast. “It’s not a grave threat to democracy if you pray against demons. It’s [a threat to democracy] when you transpose these concepts onto national politics and say the Democrats are demonic and we need to drive them out to claim authority for Christ. When you insert that kind of a frame onto democratic politics, it polarizes a society and makes cooperation impossible, because if the other side is satanic, you can’t compromise with them. That is a recipe for political violence and authoritarian behavior.”

And of course, political violence did happen at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Taylor says he has identified 60 independent charismatics who were present on that day and at least six who entered the Capitol, though he is not aware that any of them directly committed a violent act.

Taylor is particularly concerned about the Trump administration’s emphasis on fighting anti-Christian bias. “When we start to see religious majorities claim to be persecuted, that is a pretext to start persecuting other people,” he claimed. “We are seeing the ramping up of a regime that protects those inside and labels those outside as threats. It won’t remain a democracy for long under those conditions.”

Taylor points out that Christianity has a long and ugly track record of authoritarianism impulses. Ever since Constantine and Theodosius linked the church to the Roman empire in the fourth century, he told Stiller, “the blending of Christianity and national identity or empire has been one of the most destructive forces in human history,” leading to the Crusades, pogroms against Jews, the Inquisition, colonization, and Catholic-Protestant religious wars. Thus, “all they [the NAR] are doing is repackaging the leftovers of Christian imperialism and claiming it is a new solution. It has been tried before and has resulted in the bastardization of Christianity and great harm to people outside the church.”

My reactions

Taylor greatly exaggerates the NAR’s influence. Yes, people like Paula White-Cain and Lance Wallnau get nice photo ops, but I see no evidence that they influence policy. Trump administration leaders promoting Christian supremacy get their ideas from elsewhere, such as defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s connection to Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. (Interestingly, even Wallnau recently criticized Trump’s immigration policies for scaring Latinos away from attending church.)

I appreciate Taylor’s emphasis that the most prominent Christian backers of Trump are fringe elements within evangelicalism. However, many professing Christians throughout the Republican party, from members of Congress to the state level, have continued to support the Trump administration. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a reliable Trump defender, is a Southern Baptist, not a fringe charismatic.

Taylor’s focus on the NAR seems to cause him to overlook or downplay the extent to which more moderate figures in the traditional version of the Christian right shifted toward a more shrill form of politics and became defenders of Trump from 2016 onward. In short, the NAR is problematic, but they are only a tiny portion of the overall problem.

On the other hand, I question Taylor’s implication that anti-Christian bias cannot occur in what appear to be majority-Christian societies. It occurs in many forms within the US, such as selective free-speech restrictions at universities, public accusations of bigotry, or attempts to block Christian organizations from providing public services.

Taylor offers the right antidote for political authoritarianism, calling Christians to love and serve our enemies rather than to demonize and seek to crush them. I doubt that many Trumpers are listening to him. But perhaps, as more people realize the alignment between Trump and extreme, authoritarian distortions of Christianity, they will consider the extent to which what Trump is doing to America and the world is also extreme and authoritarian.